I've been covering the business of news, information and entertainment in one form or another for more than 10 years. In February 2014, I moved to San Francisco to cover the tech beat. My primary focus is social media and digital media, but I'm interested in other aspects, including but not limited to the sharing economy, lifehacking, fitness & sports tech and the evolving culture of the Bay Area. In past incarnations I've worked at AOL, Conde Nast Portfolio, Radar and WWD. Circle me on Google+, follow me on Twitter or send me tips or ideas at jbercovici@forbes.com.

4/18/2011 @ 10:05AM2,578 views

Demand Media Shares Tank as Google's Tweak Takes Effect

When Google altered its search algorithms to de-emphasize l0w-quality pages churned out by content farms, Demand Media said it didn’t matter because it wasn’t a content farm. And, for a while, the evidence seemed to agree.

No longer. With the algorithm changes now all rolled out, Demand’s biggest property, eHow, has finally felt the effect — and it was a major one. According to Sistrix, a search engine optimization [SEO] consultancy, eHow’s visibility has decreased by an eye-popping 66 percent over the past two months. That figure was generated by looking at how eHow’s pages rank on various keyword searches and the traffic those keywords generate.

Sistrix says its visibility index is generally a pretty good proxy for traffic. Not in this case, insists Demand, which quickly responded to the Sistrix report with a pair of blogposts claiming that the loss in traffic was nowhere near 66 percent.

Demand also made a point of reaffirming the fiscal year 2011 outlook it issued in February, saying the “moderately lower” traffic to eHow won’t prevent the company from achieving year-over-year page view gains across all its properties. That failed to reassure Wall Street: Demand shares promptly plunged this morning, falling below $18 for the first time since the company went public in January.

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Thanks for sharing the great news. Love how the Internet–which is still in its infancy–continues to evolve. And you have to praise Google for trying to weed out the trash, although it helps their business too. Let’s hope we are seeing a popping bubble in SEO spam sites. In the end good content wins.

I’m not sure I agree Steven. This is a slippery slope or, dare I say it, a tipping-point for Google that could go badly for them over time because it filters out most sites that publish huge volumes of similar content – even the legitimate publishers. Our site produces the only authoritative health content in our country (not the U.S.) which the algorithm may see as content farm-ish because of the sheer volume. We have been hammered by this change while drugs.com and wikipedia seems to be taking our place at the top with inferior content, clinically speaking. Rumor has it that this is likely due to a manual edit of the Google index, favoring drugs.com, on top of the content-farm-killer algorithm change, which probably favors wikipedia.

I have to say I’ve been somewhat surprised/mystified by the sites that have and haven’t been hurt by Panda (as the update is called). For instance, Ask.com is one of the sites most helped by the change. I wouldn’t even really consider it a content site. I do think, however, that the fact that eHow has lost ground is a good sign that the changes are working more or less they way they’re supposed to, blips aside. Moreover, the threat of them has already pushed Demand and others (like Examiner.com) to strive for higher quality.